March 6, 2019

Building owners and energy managers looking to evaluate renewable energy and storage
economics for their site can use REopt Lite's custom utility rate tariff capabilities and an integrated critical load profile builder—new
features that allow a more detailed energy analysis without leaving the tool.

The latest update to the National Renewable Energy Laboratory’s (NREL) REopt Lite
web tool offers a wide range of existing or hypothetical utility rates and helps identify
systems to sustain specific critical loads during a site outage.

REopt Lite's extended custom electricity rate feature allows users to build their
own detailed utility rates with energy and demand charges that vary by time of day
and season. Users can still select rate tariffs from the Utility Rate Database, but this new capability also allows users to model rates not included in that database,
such as international rates or hypothetical rates. The custom utility rate tariff
feature enables analysis across a wider range of locations, as well as what-if analysis
of potential future rates.

The critical load builder allows users to create a daily emergency load profile within
REopt Lite by building a list of equipment that is critical at their site—along with
wattage, quantity, daily operation hours, and annual operation months. The critical
load builder is based on SolarResilient, a tool developed by Arup, under contract to the Department of the City and County
of San Francisco, with funding from the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE).

The latest REopt Lite updates are also included in the REopt Lite application programming interface (API). The REopt Lite API lets users and software developers programmatically interface
with the REopt Lite web tool, evaluate multiple sites and perform sensitivity analyses
in an efficient manner, and integrate REopt Lite capabilities into other tools.

REopt Lite is a publicly available web version of the more comprehensive REopt model,
a techno-economic decision support platform that evaluates a range of renewable and
conventional energy technologies and performs complex grid outage modeling, among
other capabilities. Learn more about NREL's REopt analysis services at https://reopt.nrel.gov/.